Smartphone App Alerts Drowsy Drivers

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Drivers talking or texting on their smartphones have given mobile
devices a bad reputation as road distractions. But a new
smartphone app could actually warn drivers if they appear
distracted or drowsy behind the wheel.

The app uses smartphone technology to mimic fancier car
safety systems by detecting signs of trouble that could lead
to accidents. Modern phones with cameras facing both front and
back allow the app to monitor a driver's head pose, eyes and
blinking rate to detect possible distraction or drowsiness, even
as it keeps watch on the road ahead.

"We can determine the distance between cars in front and whether
a driver is changing lanes on the outside, while detecting
drowsiness and distraction inside," said Andrew Campbell, a
computer scientist at Dartmouth College.

The smartphone sits mounted on a dashboard holder as a hands-free
helper for drivers. Whenever the car safety app detects any
dangerous patterns in
driver behavior or outside conditions, it warns the driver
with a blinking light and a noise alert.

Such an app could provide a cheap, effective safety solution that
works with any car model. But the app developers — a team from
Dartmouth College, Autonomous National University of Mexico,
Microsoft Research Asia and the University of Bologna in Italy —
faced huge challenges while making their idea into a reality.

First, today's smartphones don't have the capability to process
video streams from both the front and back cameras
simultaneously. Campbell and his colleagues had to develop
intelligent algorithms that switch quickly between the two
cameras while processing the data. [ Best
Smartphones Reviews & Comparisons ]

The rapid-switching solution means that the car safety app
technically has a blind spot in the front or back at any given
time. Researchers fixed that problem by using the smartphone's
other sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, to figure
out what is going on in the blind spot either inside or outside
the car at any given time.

"When the phone camera is looking at the driver, we can use
accelerometer sensors to detect if the car is weaving,"
Campbell told TechNewsDaily. "We use sensors to fill in when the
camera is looking at the wrong place."

Second, the app's vision algorithms can push the computing limits
of existing smartphones and slow down the image-processing from
the cameras. If a smartphone camera typically captures video at
30 frames per second, the app's software analysis slows the
process to about 8 frames per second on an Android smartphone
that has a single computer processing core.

That limitation forced the developers to design vision algorithms
with minimal computing power requirements as they ran tests on
Samsung Galaxy smartphones. To get the best results, they
plan to first market their app for the latest quad-core
smartphones running Google's Android system sometime in 2013
(sorry iPhone users).

For now, the team aims to complete road testing of the
application with a small pool of users in either November or
December. They have enlisted 20 people and three different cars
models, but admit that it's difficult to push the limits of the
app without having drivers almost falling asleep behind the
wheel.

"Unless someone is up all night, it's difficult to predict
whether they'll be tired or not," Campbell said.